Post
"It's so refreshing to be able to talk honestly about these things now that everybody [here has] left politics ..."
#RoryStewart, 2025
Well, isn't that a revealing statement?
Yes, I did unsub from The Rest is Politics in protests at their shameless shilling for HP. But I stumbled on this 2-part interview with former SNP leader Nicola Sturgeon, which intrigues my Scottish diaspora roots, and it's well worth a listen.
Hey fellow political nerds in the UK, do you think the Greens could steal a march on Reform by announcing a policy that would allow national Parliaments in Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales to run independence referenda without needing permission from Westminster?
This would be totally in keeping with core Greens principles of participatory democracy and appropriate-level decision-making. It would boost their support among independence supporters, without needing to declare for or against.
"You'll get even friends of Alistair on the left saying, the [US] Democratic Party could have won if it hadn't leaned so hard into [identity] issues. And actually what they need to do is move away from those issues, become more relevant to everyday voters ..."
#RoryStewart, 2025
If there really are people on the left saying this - that specific angle - I'd love examples. Because to me that sounds more a never-Trump centre-right critique of the progressive left.
(1/?)
@strypey Is it a reference to this stuff? https://www.newstatesman.com/comment/2024/11/kamala-harris-perils-of-identity-politics
@sy
> Is it a reference to this stuff?
Maybe. But that article was written by a former Tory MP who served in Theresa May's Cabinet. Exactly what I meant by;
> a never-Trump centre-right critique of the progressive left
He does reference a left perspective;
"... the Bernie Sanders critique of the Democrats’ campaign. Abandon the woke obsessions of the liberal intelligentsia and focus on delivering a left-wing economic agenda for the working classes ..."
But this is a slanted summary at best.
@strypey Maybe not a great example (although New Statesman is generally considered a left liberal publication), but Sanders criticism of Harris and the Democrats for abandoning the working class was pretty widely reported... And has seemingly gained a lot of traction since then with Mamdami etc. adopting a very different stance.
@sy
> Sanders criticism of Harris and the Democrats for abandoning the working class was pretty widely reported
The conservative centre-right and the left pretty much share a critique of the Dems tone deaf, elite-centric politics. But that's where the agreement begins and ends. They and we have opposite ideas about how Dem break with their utterly failed neoliberal dogma and comes back to the centre-left.
See the rest of the thread following on from the post you replied to.
What I hear people on the left saying - because I'm one of them - is that what we need to move away from, is a moralistic, pseudo-conservative, scorched earth approach to progressive issues. Because it demonstrably alienates large chunks of the populations it purports to champion. See the huge rise in votes for Orange Stalin in black and latino communities, for example.
I've written at length about how it's also alienated people from the Greens here in Aotearoa;
https://strypey.dreamwidth.org/6069.html
(2/?)
We do need to keep talking about how human rights includes women, indigenous people, immigrants, people of colour, homosexuals, gender noncomformists, kinksters, etc, and we *certainly* need to keep talking about climate change. But what need to do differently is talk about these issues in ways that keep connecting them back to the everyday struggle for survival that unites the 99%.
(3/?)
Quite frankly, I don't give a single, solitary gob of shite about the struggles of women corporate executives to break the glass ceiling. What I do care about is;
* mothers carrying the stress of whether they can afford the rising costs of keeping their kids properly fed and getting them health care before conditions become chronic
* indigenous women dying younger on average than their settler counterparts , mostly from preventable diseases, many of those borne of poverty and overwork
(4/?)
Similarly, I don't give a shit about the struggles of middle class cyano-tories who now have to pay the full costs of buying a new EV. Cry me a fucking river. What I do care about is;
* the impact of rising public transport prices on the disabled, the elderly, and parents who can't afford to ferry their kids around in an Epsom shopping cart. People whose only option in many cases is public transport
* people who can't afford a new car, and struggle to afford fuel to get to work
(5/?)
I think that whole narrative is a vile lie that's being sold to us along with the normalization of the rightward slide. Particularly since it's being used in the UK in exactly the same fashion as the US-- it's a deliberate strategy.
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